When Mikheil Devsurashvili arrived at a polling place in the historic part of Tbilisi on October 26, he was handed a marker pen and a thin sheet of paper contained in a thick paper folder. The sheet featured a header with a QR code at the top and a pistachio-shade textbox in the middle with a list of political groups running for the Georgian Parliament. 

Devsurashvili, a cyber-security coach in his mid-30s, took the ballot to the voting booth, used the marker to color the circle next to the preferred group and closed the folder, leaving only the header of the ballot sticking out. The paperboard folder was meant to keep Devsurashvili’s choice hidden from the prying eyes. 

Following the polling official’s instructions, Devsurashvili flipped over the folder and tried to feed the ballot to the vote-tabulating machine. The machine was supposed whisk the ballot out of the folder and swallow it up for a scan. 

It did not work. After a couple of failed attempts, the election official took the folder from him. “She tried to insert it and kept pulling the ballot out of the paper case until the spot I made was visible,” said Devsurashvili. “She was holding the ballot face down, but the ink oozed through the back of the paper.”

From the back it was not quite possible to guess which specific group or party Devsurashvili picked, but it was abundantly obvious that it was not the governing Georgian Dream party. The incumbent was slated at the lowest end of the ballot, below all other contestants, so if the spot on the back was anywhere other than the very bottom of the paper, it was clear that the voter picked an opposition party.

On the other bank of the MtkvariRiver, social work expert Zurab Tatanashvili faced a similar situation at a polling station in the working-class district of Saburtalo. “As she [the election official] tried to insert the ballot, she moved it around the case, like up and down, until the spot on the back was visible to me, to her and possibly to everyone else,” Tatanashvili said. 

In another corner of the city, set designer Irakli Mchedlishvili also spotted that the ink had smudged through the back of the ballot sheet. He nearly fought a tug-of-war over his ballot with polling officials, who offered to help insert the ballot into the machine. “They kept telling me to pull out the ballot a bit more, but then you would see the blot on the back, so I did not let them do it and eventually managed to put in the ballot on my own,” Mchedlishvili told Eurasianet. 

The same scenes played out all across Georgia – this correspondent had the same experience – prompting concerns over the systematic compromising of the secret ballot. “The principle of voter secrecy was violated on the election day, which is a violation of the citizens constitutionally guaranteed rights,” said the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA), a respected democracy and rule-of-law watchdog. 

Coupled with other violations and irregularities, the mass breach of voter secrecy prompted opposition groups to dispute the outcome of the parliamentary polls that left governing majority squarely in the hands of incumbent Georgian Dream. 

European election monitors reported a 24 percent rate of potential voter-secrecy violations out of over 1,900 observations that they made on the election day. The GYLA, which had a wider network of observers stationed across the nation, said that voting secrecy was compromised at all precincts where electronic tabulators were used, and called for voiding voting results at all those precincts. 

Voting machines – a novelty in Georgia’s electoral history – were stationed at over 74 percent of 3,031 polling places operating across the country. 

Officials responsible for administering the election tried to shift the blame for the mass exposing of voters’ choices to voters themselves. The Central Election Commission (CEC) admitted that the ink was bleeding through the ballot paper but claimed that the correct use of paper folder would’ve prevented the exposure. A CEC spokeswoman, Natia Ioseliani, recorded a demonstration video, in which everything works smoothly. She signed off saying: “As you can see, all of this is false information.” 

The video was peppered with hundreds of angry comments, with citizens saying that the spokeswoman had the chance to rehearse and do several takes – an option that the citizens did not have on the election day. Also, Ioseliani was holding the paperboard folder pushed tightly against the machine’s slit, allowing the ballot with a spot on its back to slide from the folder into the tabulator without being exposed. In the Commission’s own, earlier how-to videos, the folder was not pressed tightly against the machine and the possibility of the ink oozing through the back of the ballot was not mentioned.

The widespread violation of ballot secrecy is a serious potential issue in a country, where voter intimidation, bribery and political vengeance remains an issue. Visiting European and American election observers reported cases of vote-buying and voter intimidation – both on the election day and in the run-up to the vote. 

Claims of government vote-buying were so widespread that some opposition groups even encouraged voters to take the money offered by the governing party, but still vote against the incumbent. “You’ve been stood up so many times that it is fine if you stand them up for once,” one campaign video stated.

But even the messy environment at many polling stations left little room for such trickery. Even as they held their ballots face down, some voters were requested to pull down the bottom part of the ballot from the folder to confirm that the dot was down where Georgian Dream was listed, volunteer observers told Eurasianet. Ruling party representatives were present at many polling stations and party coordinators waited outside.   

Dismissing claims of election fraud and the deliberate violation of ballot secrecy, Georgian Dream insists that it won in a fair fight and accuses the observers of helping the political opposition sow discord and unrest in the nation. One Georgian court however agreed with several dozens of complaints about the violation of voter secrecy lodged by GYLA. 

“Upon inspecting the evidence, the court plainly and unequivocally found that this electoral device, ballot and folder did not provide the guarantee to the voters that their votes and the secrecy of their choice would be protected,” Tetristkaro District Judge Vladimer Khuchua ruled on November 4, effectively revoking election results at 30 provincial precincts.   

The ruling came as a surprise in the country where the judiciary branch has a poor reputation for independence from the ruling establishment. The verdict, along with continued protests from the opposition and watchdogs, suggest that the official CEC tally of October 26 election may not be the final result.